Somewhere in a faraway warehouse, amidst a labyrinth of towering inventory, a new box appears. A strange label rests upon its seam:
“Mänsklig: The Ideal Human. Some Assembly Required.”
It sits between an armchair and an oddly head-shaped table lamp. A box that hums, faintly alive. The cardboard feels warm under your fingers. Inside, something (or someone) awaits construction.
You slice open the tape and peel back the flaps. Each winding part you unearth feels disturbingly organic, slick and pulsing, intimately sacred. You lay out these slimy entrails and pick out a metal rib. All you can see is Adam without his Eve.
The instruction manual is printed in a calm sans serif. Attach in numerical order, it says. This all seems sinisterly familiar.
Step One: Insert Degree into Torso
“Failure to install degree correctly may result in reduced shelf life.”
Education is the first and most crucial component in assembling the Mänsklig. It determines whether the final product stands firm or collapses under pressure. In Singapore, the process begins early. From national examinations to enrichment classes, each test is a screw tightened with anxious precision. Success will only ever promise stability, while failure leaves you half-assembled, rattling helplessly on the showroom floor.
In the later stages of the Singaporean education system, the instructions barely differ. A degree may seem like a luxury add-on, and not a default part of the kit. Attending a ‘top’ university confers prestige like a designer label stamped on the latest human model. Most notably, becoming a student at the National University of Singapore can feel like it affords a lifetime of bragging rights. But the hidden cost lies between the margins:
“Student debt may apply. Emotional exhaustion sold separately.”
Some Singaporeans may grow up believing, out of habit, that a great education is pertinent to our victory in life. Curiosity then becomes transfigured into efficiency, and wonder is traded for measurable outcomes. The mind becomes another compartment, a vessel to be filled and sealed. Like the scroll lodged in your chests, you become stitched together from expectations that were never entirely your own.
Step Two: Attach Career Ladder to Spine
“Over-tightening may cause spinal misalignment and burnout.”
If education builds the frame, work fortifies the skeleton. In the corporate world, the ladder gleams with respectable rungs, from doctors and lawyers to scientists and entrepreneurs. The higher you climb, the more precarious the joints become, but no one dares to stop chasing the summit. Along the Central Business District, human cogs in the machine slip on polished suits like second skin and stay crouched over their desks, typing away in perpetual motion. Their posture straightens only for LinkedIn photos.
Deep in the crevices of corporate mazes, a recent mushrooming of tech start-ups market flexibility as freedom, though its workers are chained to constant innovation. Invest early; create your own wealth. Time is money, and money certainly promises happiness. In reality, these cogs in the machine are simply assembled from a mishmash of caffeine and anxiety disorders disguised as ambition. In a society with such a stringently rigid work culture, the employee’s screws are fixed for life, stable but immovable. Everyone is afforded the illusion of free will from financial stability, but has that ever been the case? What does it mean to be free from all obligations? Every profession has its poison of choice, and none truly escape the assembly line.
The ladder, as the manual insists, is not optional. You avert your eyes from the question of whether the ladder might be the problem to begin with. You fail to realise that climbing endlessly might just lead you to the ceiling of your own exhaustion.
Step Three: Family Package (Not Included in Starter Kit)
“Assembly may be delayed 5-7 years (depending on BTO construction timelines).”
The family is a purchasable bundle. Between Built-to-Order (BTO) flats and baby bonuses, the Singaporean Dream is built upon the nuclear family. The home becomes a product of bureaucracy, and romance a logistical partnership. Couples apply for flats before they even propose, as though intimacy were simply another milestone to check off the unspoken list of canon events that occur in your twenties. Because surely, it is in the best interest of every model Singaporean to concern themselves with achieving the 5Cs: Cash, car, credit card, condominium, and country club membership.
Sometimes, the instructions can even be time-sensitive. In China, some elders believe that women must marry by thirty or risk being labelled sheng nü or “leftover woman”, like unsold stock gathering dust in the hidden corners of the warehouse. Many of the wise elders of Singapore still subscribe to this archaic view. Your parents want nothing more than for you to tread the path oft taken.
The family module, then, becomes universal in its illusion; nothing more than a structure promising emotional fulfilment but serving as yet another form of standardisation. You are told to love according to the catalogue: Nothing more, nothing less.
Warning: Unwarranted Returns
The fine print appears at the end of the manual in the smallest possible font:
“Warranty voided by burnout. Returns not accepted.”
Every society maintains a repair policy for malfunctioning humans, for those who are left feeling deeply unfulfilled and unsatisfied with irksome routines. One solution is to become the markedly superior lifelong learner, with Coursera and SkillsFuture courses promising “reassembly” for mid-career switchers. Perhaps it is a rather polite way of saying, “Try turning your life off and on again.”
Around the world, the cult of hustle culture has humans patching themselves with duct tape. Gig workers are running multiple side hustles to survive, convinced that exhaustion is a feature and not a flaw. In Asia specifically, the pressure to perform leads to one of the highest youth suicide rates in the world, with suicide being the leading cause of death for Singaporean youths aged 10 to 29. This is the ultimate collapse under a design too immutable for life.
To rub salt in the wound, the manual’s customer service line is predictably unhelpful.
“Contact support for spare parts. Response time may vary.”
Mental health is increasingly structured like a subscription model, easier to access those who can pay for counselling apps or wellness retreats. For many others, self-help books become the most available and affordable forms of support. There is nothing wrong with turning to these tools – for some, they are genuinely helpful. The problem lies in how the broader system frames well-being as something to be individually managed and optimised. If relief doesn’t arrive, it can feel like a personal failure rather than a reflection of structural pressures that no amount of self-assembly can fully resolve.
The Leftover Screws
Across the globe, everyone subscribes to The Manual for Human Use. It becomes a doctrine of sorts; an urge to perform in education, employment, and even infiltrates familial and interpersonal relationships. If you follow these prescriptions, you are absolutely guaranteed to come out polished and complete. Yet, when you finally stand upright, gleaming and assembled, you are less human than you once were. Too obedient, too still.
Yet, at the end of the manual lies a small plastic packet of leftover screws. The diagram claims they are “extras”, but you suspect that they were simply forgotten along the way. They rattle softly, mocking the illusion of completeness.
Perhaps those leftover screws were not mistakes at all. They are the stray passions we abandon, the creative detours we are told to discard, the unmeasurable joys that resist efficiency. They are the parts that make us unpredictable, and thus indubitably alive.
Not everyone follows the Manual. Some skip steps, others invent their own. The artist who refuses a corporate career, the single parent who finds love once their little ones leave the nest. The youth who leaves the ladder altogether, designing a new nomadic life from scavenged parts. These small rebellions are the quiet revolutions of our age. They are living, breathing proof that deviation is an act of humanity.
So here’s to misaligned shelves and the uneven table legs. Here’s to those who refuse the ladder, who leave some screws unfastened just to see what happens. The manual was never the gospel. In fact, it was only ever just an outdated suggestion.
Editor’s Note:
This piece is a satirical creative work which comments on the idealised “Singapore Dream”. It reflects the author’s personal opinions on Singapore’s education system, credentialism, and ambition. The Ridge encourages readers to engage critically with the ideas presented.